We said “Never again…”
Are
the international community and the media repeating the same mistakes
in Sudan that failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide?
In April 2004, the world marked the ten-year anniversary
of the Rwandan genocide with a chorus of mea culpas. “800,000
dead in just 100 days…and the world stood by and did nothing,”
said one headline. “Genocide: We just ignored it,” said
another. World opinion agreed: “Rwanda’s genocide could
have been prevented”. Yet, as the international community engaged
in its public hand-wringing, a similar catastrophe was unfolding in
silence in Sudan’s western province of Darfur.
Where-fur?
Darfur straddles the semi-arid border region of Chad and Sudan. Although
the population is predominantly Muslim, it is divided ethnically between
the nomadic Arab tribes of the north and the settled black African
peoples of the central and southern zones. It has seen occasional
periods of conflict for many years, most often when Arab pastoralists
migrated south in search of water. Such clashes became progressively
bloodier during the 80s and 90s as drought and automatic weapons became
more common in the region. In most conflicts, the Islamist government
in Khartoum backed the nomadic Arabs at the expense of the black Africans.
Over the years, this policy made the black Darfurians some of the
poorest people in Sudan.
The latest conflict began in February 2003, with
the rise of two black African militias, the Sudan Liberation Army
(SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). The groups, who
formed a loose coalition, claimed to be fighting against decades of
government discrimination against the black African population of
Darfur, marginalising them both politically and economically. They
demanded increased economic development in the region and power sharing
with the central government.
The rebel campaign saw a number of early successes,
but in July 2003 the government significantly escalated its military
involvement. Beginning bombing raids over towns and cities in Darfur,
the government sent more troops and armour into the region and began
to recruit tens of thousands of Arab men into a militia called the
Janjaweed. It was becoming a major regional conflict, but the world
paid little attention. On the very few occasions that the conflict
was mentioned in the media, it was portrayed as just another of the
countless “government versus rebel” wars that trouble
Africa.
Fast forward to the present, and this unknown conflict
has become what UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland called
“the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”. Over 100,000
refugees have fled across the border into Chad, 750,000 more are believed
to be trapped within Darfur. Unknown thousands of civilians have already
lost their lives; hundreds of thousands more are on the brink of death
from starvation and disease. The scale of the crisis is astounding,
but for those who view the world through the eyes of television news
or daily newspapers, it would seem that it happened overnight.
This drastic escalation of the conflict went largely
unnoticed in British press. From the beginning of the conflict until
April 2004, The Guardian and Independent had a handful of stories,
while the Times and Telegraph featured only a couple of mentions in
their international news brief sections. The BBC website was one of
the few outlets with comprehensive coverage, but stories rarely made
it into television bulletins. In the US, occasional wire stories told
of refugees on the Chad border, but other than Nicholas Kristof of
the New York Times, it seemed that no American reporter had even visited
the region.
Does anyone know what is really going on?
Many human rights groups had already gathered detailed accounts from
refugees in Chad. Their stories painted a picture of the Sudanese
government conducting a “scorched earth” policy in Darfur,
with the aim of removing non-Arab groups from the region permanently.
In conjunction with the janjaweed militia, who the government arms,
recruits and is believed to command, it is accused of a systematic
campaign of bombing, looting, murder and rape against the black African
civilians. Whole villages have been burned with many inhabitants killed.
The surviving population has fled to squalid camps within Darfur,
where they are reportedly surrounded and starved by the government
forces and the militia. The lucky ones made it over the border into
Chad.
Empty words
Until April, all this was happening in silence, but recently many
high profile figures have spoken out. George Bush urged the Sudanese
government to “immediately stop local militias from committing
atrocities against the local population” and Kofi Annan said
the crisis left him with a “deep sense of foreboding”,
but still nothing changed on the ground. A combination of the distraction
of Iraq, fear of jeopardising the peace talks in the south and a misguided
belief that the Khartoum government will respond to diplomatic pressure
has prevented any real action. The UN even suppressed its own report
blaming the Khartoum government for the atrocities in exchange for
access to Darfur, something one observer described as a “deal
with the devil”.
Many observers see this as a repeat of the UN’s
catastrophic failure to protect the Tutsis of Rwanda. “It’s
great that the US president and the UN secretary general condemn what’s
happening,” says Leslie Lefkow of Human Rights Watch, “but
if in the end we don’t actually see that recognition translated
into action, then it’s a failure.”
The same old mistakes
If the international community’s response to Darfur echoes Rwanda,
the same is true of the media.
Writing on the tenth anniversary of the genocide,
BBC producer Tom Giles talked of hearing of the killings in Rwanda
as early as 6 April 1994. But the danger and difficulty of accessing
Rwanda, the focus on elections in South Africa and general lack of
understanding of an “African blood feud” in an obscure
nation kept the story off the headlines.
It wasn’t until 30 April, when 250,000 Hutu
refugees crossed into Tanzania, that his editor first took interest.
Even then, Mr Giles said the true extent of the story didn’t
emerge for six weeks. “It was clear that this was not a story
of refugees or of some distant civil war, but of a systematic genocide
still being carried out,” he said. “But it was hard to
get this message across – this was a complicated country that
few people had heard of.” As a result, “one of the 20th
century’s worst crimes had failed to make the top of the TV
news bulletins.”
In Darfur, the issue of access is also the main problem.
Khartoum has all but closed Darfur to foreigners. The only available
witnesses are the 100,000 refugees camped on the Sudan-Chad border.
Nicholas Kristof said the logistics of getting to
the border were “pretty overwhelming”. He described driving
for a day along a dirt track, with nothing but camels for company,
to reach the border. There he found nowhere to sleep or buy food.
He and his producer were surviving on granola bars and contemplating
camping in the desert until the UNHCR took them in.
But the excuse of difficult access only goes so far.
Big news organisations have ample resources to overcome such difficulties.
For reporters who reach the Sudanese border, plenty of accurate information
is available. Few doubt the veracity of refugees’ accounts of
the atrocities in Darfur. “All accounts tally from different
places, different people, and just the way they tell the story,”
says Gill Lusk, deputy editor of Africa Confidential magazine. “Darfur
is probably the most resilient place in Sudan; people are used to
surviving great hardship. They only flee at the last minute when things
are absolutely dire.”
While the nature of the situation in Darfur makes
reporting difficult, many observers agree that the problem goes deeper
- to the way the media views Africa as a whole.
“Africa is on a much lower priority in terms
of global event,” says Ms Lefko. “Look at the major dailies,
often they’ll only have one person covering the whole of Africa.
That’s absurd given the level of events there.” She says
that most issues only start to receive attention when they reach catastrophic
levels. “There is a tendency to wait until you’ve got
the most dramatic pictures, and by that time it’s often too
late.”
If the big news organisations are not interested,
even committed journalists struggle to cover such a remote area. “I
can think of only three journalists and two photographers who have
been in Darfur,” says Ms Lusk. “If you’re a freelancer
you just can’t do it; the cost is so high just getting the plane
ticket, leaving out things like insurance.”
Have we learned nothing?
“The international media don’t send reporters to cover
genocides. They cover genocide anniversaries,”14 wrote Carroll
Bogert, Associate Director of Human Rights Watch, earlier this week.
It is a harsh indictment, but events in Darfur may prove her right.
As newspapers and broadcasters just begin to wake up to the crisis,
the US Agency for International Development says it probably already
too late for at least 100,000 refugees. “This is a man-made
famine,” says Ms Lefkow. “Any deaths from lack of food
or disease are fully the responsibility of the government of Sudan,
just as much as people who have died from bullets.”
When this crisis is over, how many more journalists
will be feeling the “lingering sense of guilt, perhaps shame,
that we didn’t do more,” described by Tom Giles after
his experience in Rwanda? Hopefully, we will have learned our lesson
by the next anniversary.
Picture copyright Human Rights Watch 2004
